Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi Testifies Before Committee on Agriculture on Combating the Dangers the Chinese Communist Party Poses to American Agriculture While Preventing Anti-Asian Discrimination

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) provided testimony to the House Committee on Agriculture’s Chairman Glen Thompson (R-PA) and Ranking Member David Scott (D-GA) during a hearing on the continuous threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party to the United States’ agriculture industry, including but not limited to impacts on the supply chain, trade barriers, acquisition of U.S. farmland, and IP theft.

Click here to access video of the testimony.

A full transcript of Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi’s remarks can be found below.

Chairman Thompson, Ranking Member Scott, Members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak today.

Agriculture has always been a cornerstone of the U.S.-China relationship, and Chairman Gallagher and I work closely with our members on the Ag. Committee on this important issue. In August 2023, the Chairman and I traveled to Dysart, a small town in Iowa.

In 2011, not very far from Dysart, a farmer saw a man digging in the cornfields. After some investigation, authorities discovered that this man was not just digging for fun. He was looking for proprietary corn seeds to send back to his employer, a Chinese corn seed company. The man eventually tried to ship 250 pounds of corn seeds to Hong Kong disguised in Costco-sized packs of microwave popcorn. The total cost of this one case of IP theft was estimated to be $30 million dollars.

Agricultural technology is a prime target of intellectual property theft because American technology and farming are the best and most productive in the world. The Select Committee’s bipartisan Economic Report, released in December last year, included broad recommendations on how to best protect our intellectual property. For the ag. sector, we need to continue to improve coordination between local and federal law enforcement agencies, and properly resource and train the Department of Justice to prosecute these crimes.

There are other ag.-related concerns addressed in our Economic Report. Congresswoman Slotkin and Congresswoman Hinson have already transformed another Econ Report recommendation into the Securing American Agriculture Act, which will require the USDA to study the supply chains of our agricultural inputs, including vitamins, animal feed, and pesticides, where the PRC has been increasingly dominating the market and crowding out American and other suppliers. As we continue to remain in an era of uncertainty in our trade relationship with the PRC, we also need to better protect American farmers from retaliation by the CCP, including diversifying American agricultural exports to different markets.

Chairman Gallagher has spoken about the issue of land sales. There are legitimate concerns with a few land purchases by PRC entities close to sensitive and military sites. However, as we address these problems, we have to make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease. Some purported solutions have had very real and harmful effects on the Asian American community as well. Dozens of bills, for instance, target Chinese nationals regardless of whether they are affiliated with the CCP and regardless of their proximity of land acquisitions to sensitive sites.

Florida, for example, passed SB264, a law that prohibits Chinese nationals from purchasing real property in the state. This law has a serious, negative impact on the Asian American community. I will give you one example. There is the case of Zhiming Xu, a political asylee living in Florida who was persecuted by the CCP and who fled the United States. He was beginning to rebuild his life in Florida. Since the passage of SB264, Mr. Xu was forced to cancel the contract for the purchase of what was otherwise going to be his new home in his new country. The lesson here is clear: when land purchase bills target individuals who are Chinese immigrants, they often target those outside of the intended audience.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education fund filed a lawsuit against this particular law on equal protection grounds. Laws like SB264 are neither fair nor justified. In the early 20th century, states passed similar “alien land laws” in more than a dozen other states, prohibiting Chinese and Japanese immigrants from becoming landowners. Those policies severely restricted economic opportunities and exacerbated discrimination against Asian communities in the United States, and every single one of those laws were repealed one by one – in all of those states. So please, as you consider these land purchase laws, let’s be careful. You folks don’t want to pursue policies that discriminate against anybody. In that spirit, let’s be careful not to adopt or to encourage those types of policies.

Chairman Thompson, Ranking Member Scott, thank you again for this very special opportunity to testify before this very distinguished committee. The Select Committee very much looks forward to working with your Committee in the future. I thank you again.  

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